Efforts to explain the drop in language skills have focused on two factors:
the high number of hours per week that children watch television (approxi-
mately 30) and the widespread shift from phonics as the basis for reading in-
struction to whole-language approaches. There is no question that television
exerts an insidious influence on children’s language development, if for no
other reason than that it isolates young people from the social interactions with
adults and peers that are crucial to good language skills. Instead of playing and
having conversations with other children, too many young people are rooted in
front of a TV set afternoons, evenings, and weekends.
Most of the programs children watch are cartoons, hardly a language-rich
genre. Many parents justify the hours their children spend watching cartoons
by believing that an hour or so ofSesame Streeteach day provides a restorative
educational balance. The reasoning is similar to that displayed by the over-
weight person who orders a diet soda to wash down the chili cheese fries. Fur-
thermore, the few studies that have examined the pedagogical foundations and
benefits ofSesame Streetsuggested not only that the show did not employ
sound pedagogical principles but also that it does more harm than good (Burns
& Anderson, 1991; Meringoff, 1980; Singer, 1980).
The issue of reading instruction may be important. Certainly, many people feel
that the shift in numerous schools from phonics to whole-language approaches
during the 1980s had a deleterious effect on language in general and reading in par-
ticular. Reading leads to larger vocabularies and richer sentence structures, which
have beneficial effects on language skills, and if whole-language approaches lead
to greater difficulty in reading, students will be less likely to reap these benefits.
The problem with this argument is that most schools that experimented with whole
language have shifted back to phonics. Indeed, the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act
essentially mandated this change. Thus, the issue of reading instruction seems
moot. The only thing we know for sure is that the amount of reading young people
do today is significantly lower than it was just 30 years ago (Healy, 1990). In fact,
many young people today never do any pleasure reading.
Meanwhile, it is reasonable to conclude that the plunge in language skills
among students is linked to a decline in skills among teachers. Approximately
60% of all university professors today are first-generation college graduates,
and it is safe to assume that a large portion came from working-class back-
grounds where nonstandard English was the norm and the Standard English of
the schools the exception. Having established their careers and no longer fac-
ing the compulsion to be insiders, these teachers are in a position to abandon
the Standard English that they mastered in order to succeed and to slip comfort-
ably into the home dialects of their childhood. On many college campuses to-
day, the speech of students and faculty is almost indistinguishable.
DIALECTS 235